I regularly think about this essay about the evolution of #centralization in computing. It focuses on businesses and research, but I have a feeling that the next stage of #decentralization will happen via the general public.
We don't have to rely on energy-hungry, leak-prone servers to run 24/7 to do our basic tasks. We need more local-first computing.
It’s no secret that most people have been increasingly concerned about Internet centralization over the last decade or so. Having one party (or a small number of them) with a choke hold over any important part of the Internet is counter to its nature: as a ‘network of networks’, the Internet is about fostering relationships between peers, not allowing power to accrue to a few.
As I’ve discussed previously, Internet standards bodies (like the IETF and W3C) can be seen as a kind of regulator, in that they constrain the behaviour of others. So it’s natural to wonder whether they can help avoid or mitigate Internet centralization."
What's complicated about #centralization vs #decentralization is that neither is the optimum. Not only is it a shades of gray thing, but any non-trivial system is likely going to have both more and less de/centralized parts.
The US transportation system that @mmasnick is talking about is a great example. Almost completely centralized traffic rules and road funding. Federated construction. But enabling decentralized, localized innovation in use and economic benefits.
Where I speak some advantages Signal has over the bigger richer rest of tech:
“We don’t have to be full of shit. We’re not a surveillance company. I’m not trying to pretend Facebook is good. I don’t have to toe a party line that is divorced from reality”
#SocialMedia#DigitalPlatforms#Personalization#Centralization#Search#SearchEngines: "In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the economies of search and information retrieval concerning how the products of giant platform companies consolidate and represent facts directly in their search results. Concomitantly, media, communication, and information scholars have recently refocused on how media technology companies variably create, collect, connect, and commercialize data related to facts about the world and how such processes have implications for how we know the world. Such approaches often counter popular narratives that seek to frame the problems of platforms in terms of personalization and personalized content. While research on the personalization afforded by media is widespread, platforms also engage in the centralization of facts by merging web data representing factual claims and offering answers directly in search engines and virtual assistants’ results and responses (what we refer to as “fast facts”). These processes considerably affect how knowledge is constructed and shared in a networked society. This special issue collects empirical investigative research on the platformization, exploitation, and centralization of facts while offering a variety of perspectives from which to study these developments, including semantic and infrastructural techniques. This article provides an overview of this field and contextualizes recent media studies on search and information retrieval in broader debates around facts and truth claims."
Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards
This document discusses aspects of centralization that relate to Internet standards efforts. It argues that while standards bodies have little ability to prevent many forms of centralization, they can still make contributions that improve the Internet.
The big contradiction of the #Fediverse is that people want e. g. #Mastodon to be more popular and accepted than e. g. #Twitter or #Threads but yet they are ANTI EVERYTHING; No companies, no this and that, no federation, "I will fucking block you all" for even looking at the mainstream popular culture.
⎧ A large chunk of the Anglo-speaking sphere I experience originates and is operated by American organisations. Within this sphere, we all feel any disturbances or changes made by the major players. We are all affected when an AWS data centre goes down. Our combined productivity goes down when Google publishes an enticing Doodle. Any dint to Facebook’s SLA and we all find out as it hits the mainstream media⎭
@saluki Absolutely! This, if anything, shows us once again how you can't trust #centralization. It was the last straw in having faith in Reddit, I guess.
Oh well, the official #Mastodon app doubled down on making mastodon.social the default sign-up server. This is a risky move because this will undeniably make the server bigger than it already is.
It is still unclear why mastodon.social, of all instances, was chosen, while there are so many other instances. I'm not too happy with this decision.